A fourth police officer who responded to the Capitol riot on 6 January has committed suicide. That's statistically unlikely, points out PJ Media.
The MPD has 3,800 officers, meaning that the force has had a suicide rate of just over 4 per 1,000 in just the last few months.
In 2019, the national suicide rate was about 0.14 per 1,000.
Even with 2020’s higher suicide rate (we couldn’t find final figures in time for today’s column), an MPD officer is about 25 times more likely to die by their own hand than a typical American.
The ratio skews even more towards the extreme when you consider that not nearly every one of the MPD’s 3,800 officers responded to the riot.
But who’s going to investigate? The same MPD that’s taken such poor care of its own officers? The FBI that may have enticed and entrapped protestors into becoming rioters?
It's easy to imagine the mafia agreeing to eliminate Jeffrey Epstein at the behest of powerful people who could provide useful favors, and also political protection from any investigation (the official finding was, of course, suicide). The cascade failure of prison security systems meant to prevent suicides also made it look much more like murder than like a suicide.
It's pretty hard to believe in a similar conspiracy to murder police officers to keep them from talking about what they saw on 6 January.
That leaves actual suicide as probable; but what then explains this extraordinary rate? Not PTSD, surely, given that there wasn't actually severe violence -- no machinegunning of the crowd, no massive death toll of any kind. It's just bad luck, I suppose; statistics only appear in broad enough segments, and for whatever set of reasons it just so happened that a statistically unlikely band of suicides occurred.
Definitely it is the sort of thing that gives additional heat to our national discourse, though. Yet we are not the main matter: we should pray for their souls and families.
5 comments:
It is hard to guess, especially, as you note, with small numbers. They may feel under severe social criticism. They may feel guilty. They may fear legal consequences. It may be random. I don't think any study or internal investigation is going to reveal much.
Someone will have to write a book on it, and that will take a while.
We have drugs that sometimes treat depression. Could there be drugs that sometimes induce it? IIRC an autopsy only looks for things they expect.
The other thing, though, is that suicides cluster. If one person commits suicide, other close peers are more likely to commit suicide as well, IIRC.
I looked at that statistic repeatedly then clicked on the link and the correction is up over there as an update to the piece:
... 4 per 3800 does not equal 4 per 1000. [snip] [It's] a bit over 1 per 1000 compared to the national rate of .14 per 1000 so ~7 times worse. Bad enough.
To be more accurate, one of the suicides was not a member of the Metropolitan Police Department but rather of the Capitol Police force. So 3 per 3800 which is .79 per 1000. The Capitol Police force rate becomes .67 per 1000 (1 out of a perhaps low officer count of 1500).
So, yes, tragic but not double digits bad. If I were trying to make sense of this, I would want to know:
- the suicide rates for the Capitol Police force and for the Metropolitan Police Department in 2020 and before that;
- the suicide rates are for law enforcement generally (one source says .224 per 1000 in 2019) and for law enforcement engulfed in the riots last year;
- whether any of the officers who committed suicide were among those criticized, disciplined, or under investigation for the January 6 incident or any other incident.
In general, though, I agree that the raw numbers are so small it seems like a statistical fluke. And I also agree it adds fuel to the fire of the discussion of January 6 which makes the deaths seem even sadder, that the individuals involved would get lost in the noise (yes, mixed metaphor).
There exists a cliché " I question the timing."
Is it most reasonable to assume there can be no causal relationship between the despair of a police officer, and the first week of testimony of his superiors in a well-publicized investigation into many officers' actions in historic events? I, for one, would find myself extraordinarily distressed to be pushed across a line from, for instance, keeping silent about an event, versus being required to corroborate a liar's lies about that event.
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